
Written and Experienced by Maxwell Edison
As we round the final stretch into June, we’re entering protest season and things are getting a whole other kind of hot out on the street (not just our temperatures reaching into the low triple digits). Mutual Aid, community building, and resistance against the growing fascist threat don’t take a pause for the weather, and on Saturday two groups did just those in spite of the sun.
At the Tonatierra…
For eighteen years, a class action lawsuit has been going on between victims of racial profiling and the Maricopa County Sheriffs Office. Joe was found in contempt, then pardoned. The monitoring team, constructed by this case to assess how badly the MCSO is trampling our human rights, has been working on working on the problem for years. While the racism is still deeply manifest and even untouched within the culture of the department, their relationships with the communities they occupy, and in the lives of their countless victims, the monitoring team has been faithfully organizing and conducting community meetings for the sheriff and overseers to ignore the people directly.
The environment in these meetings is choked by the presence and indifference of usually dozens of cops. At the last one in Sunnyslope, I called their 4th Ave Jail a torture center only for a lady representing their corrections bureau to hand me her business card “in case [I] wanted to talk about collaborating on anything”. Despite their nonchalant attitude towards their civil rights record, protesters and community members do speak at these events and find community among one another in them.
Since Trump shook up the Department of Justice and issued an onslaught of policies to enable police misconduct there has been no effective oversight on this case. I was told that seven of eight lawyers assigned to the case were cut by the DOJ. It’s in light of that abandonment and the continued flaunting by the Sheriff his indifference to the principles represented by the ruling that this community meeting- actually organized by the community this time, was arranged.
The people who spoke on Saturday were rightfully worried. Their communities have been under attack without recourse for decades. The people are scared about the arrival of Fascism in our country, and the profiling that rose and took its seat alongside it- Jerry Scaredy Sheridan got elected off the same wave of bigotry and cowardice that put Donald in office. They’re thinking of the people who’re behind the wire, having been kidnapped over their immigration status or profiled because of their race. Most of all though, I left the Tonatierra convinced that if any community was ready to persist through the trials of revolutionary change it was this one. Any group has lessons to learn from them in how they organize, coordinate, and support one another.
Just after, at the Arizona Biltmore…
Andy “The Bigot” Biggs- Arizonan politician, supporter of the military Junta in Myanmar, and denier of the temperature of the planet held a campaign event at the Arizona Biltmore to support his upcoming bid for Governor. Protesters at the intersection approaching the resort held signs standing against white supremacy and fascism, two things Biggs himself has had trouble doing throughout his political career since he’s made a name for himself speaking at Proud Boy rallies and claiming that Antifa was responsible for the storming of the capitol building. I haven’t seen a comment from Biggs about his thoughts on those Antifa agents receiving pardons from President Trump, who endorsed his campaign for governor.
Meanwhile Charlie Kirk and TPUSA are unfortunate fixtures of the Valley’s political scene (for now) and naturally with the offer of a bourgeois venue and the enormous implications of Arizona getting a collaborationist Governor they threw their weight behind Andy for Saturday’s event. They have a relationship with Biggs prior to this rally, he was a speaker at their infamous AmericaFest just last year. He has a glowing 97.82 “Patriot Score” according to turning point (presumably out of a hundred?) and multiple imaginary sounding honorifics like the “Taxpayers’ Friend Award” and being awarded “Conservative Excellence” from the American Conservative Union… which might be the hardest CPAC vouched for anyone since they tried getting Congress on board with aiding the Contras.
At the intersection off 24th Street leading up to the resort, a group of protesters organized by Indivisible Mesa kept up good energy for about an hour in the heat. Arriving when doors opened for the rally, they confronted passing drivers who more often honked in support than huffed in retaliation. The exception being along a little strip of sidewalk next to the turn lane.
This is where attendees would get off and head towards parking for the rally. A number of cars slowed down to flip off or mock the protesters standing along that piece of road. It didn’t end up looking good on their end, though, to flip off an upbeat local teacher who was parading around with her anti-Nazi sign.
There was a second organized presence on 24th, with an anti-Israel message. A trio showed up protesting Charlie Kirk and his support of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Once the other protesters left for the day, megaphone chants of “What is Andy Briggs? A fascist!” Were replaced with calls against the war towards the drivers of passing cars. I spoke with their organizer about different sorts of protests, the importance of showing a presence and the tactical use of informative protests… which is a topic I plan to continue on another day, but the combination of those two groups in sequence should act as a good model for how a multi-modal action can arise naturally between groups with overlapping goals.
Thanks for getting this far, I hope to see you out there next time.
There were good folks out and about yesterday, and I was glad to have the pleasure of meeting them- which you can have too! This ain’t your daddy’s Fox News segment, we make calls to action around here… so take this as a sign that things are still happening and you have a place within them. Communities are forming and galvanizing against the forces trying to destroy them. Normal people are out showing their presence in front of rallies held by dangerous authoritarians. Go out there into our valley, and make your place in our local shared spaces to keep the valley alive through a climate that’s trying its best to kill us.
If you are interested in finding the characters of today’s story, you can visit the Tonatierra’s website at https://www.tonatierra.org
Indivisible Mesa can be found as @indivisiblemesa on both Bluesky and Facebook
The final folks I met gave me a card from the Patten Report, which you can read at https://kmpatten.substack.com
Last but not least, feel free to reach out to me with any questions, comments, concerns, threats, banter, gifts, or any other cause for purposeful contact. Be safe and be free-